Mozilla Boot to Gecko OS Release Date Is Early 2013

21.04.2012

It looks like iOS, Android and Windows Phone will have a new rival starting 2013, as Mozilla plans to launch their own OS, Boot to Gecko, in the first months of the next year.

As you probably know (or probably not) , WebOS, Palm’s in house operating system had its user interface created in HTML and JavaScript, thus you can basically consider WebOS UI a sort of advanced web page. This concept served as inspiration for Mozilla, the creators of the popular Firefox web browser, as the US-based company is working hard to launch their own OS: Boot to Gecko.

Gecko is the name of the company’s rendering engine and unlike Palm and WebOS, Mozilla plans to offer their platform to developers and carriers in open source regime. Their main goal is to create a solution which will fight against Google’s Android, and for the time being the user interface is rudimentary. You can convince yourself while watching the hands-on video bellow. The Brazilian website ZTop says that Boot to Gecko and the terminals running on it will arrive on the market in early 2013, quoting Mozilla CEO, Gary Kovacs, who made the release date announcement in Sao Paulo, Brazil.

We don’t know yet what hardware manufacturers or carriers were chosen for the Boot to Gecko project, but as long as Telefonica supports Mozilla’s OS, it’s pretty obvious that they will also get involved in retailing the terminals running on the open source platform.

The proof that an operating system like Boot to Gecko can be successful is Samsung’s Bada OS, as well based on Linux. The problem is currently there are not so may Bada models on the market, so Samsung’s OS is not very popular nowadays. Anyway it seems that Samsung has no plans of launching another Bada OS device in the near future, and the South Koreans are one of the world’s biggest smartphone makers. So, will Mozilla be able to count on the mobile market without a huge partner like Samsung?